cclragnarok Said,

wontaek Said,

I consider lack of transparency caused by invalid votes to be a big probelm in SaiMoe. How do we know whether some of those invalid votes were actually legit votes? How come there are so many invalid votes and why is nothing being done to prevent that? The matchups and invalid votes all smell very fishy and seems to be aimed to making certain charcter, a winner. Suiseiseki won in Korean Moe Tournament with some controversies. I feel that same may happen in Japanese Moe tournament as well.

Xellos-_^ Said,

The fact that all three of the major MoSH characters were place in the same block told me there Anti-Haruhist in the Saimoe organization. And RM had 4 character spread out over 3 blocks. Also How did Fate and Nanoha wind up in the same block.

Smells damn fishy to me.

wontaek Said,

That is why I believe that any tournament has to make it known how the matchups will be decided and how can outsiders verify the decision process to minimize the element of doubts. It is for this reason, announcing of seeds are important as well as how the seeds will be decided. I wrote something about his in AnimeNano Forum so please check if you are interested.

Haesslich Said,

Yeah, that’s what I’m worried about Wontaek – that they’re stacking the deck in favor of Rozen Maiden, and they’re structuring things (or, when necessary, flat-out lying) in order to make their chosen candidates win… especially since I’m trying to figure out how they ruled all those votes as fakes (given that the number of fakes were doubled in the Yuki vote versus Suisuiseki’s). Either that, or else everyone’s enchanted by the manga which presents Suisuiseki (at least initially) as a Mikuru-style pushover.

Well… we can’t help it. This is an internet-based free voting tournament. There’s bound to be a lot of foul play. It’s much much harder to employ really efficient error-checking methods in this age of proxies and TOR.

Much more a bigger problem than that are the problem of biased officials, which is blatant if you see the groupings. As pointed out, SuzuHaru, the biggest phenomenom this year, had *ALL* three main heroines in the *SAME* group, pretty much fishy if you notice that no other series had the same problem.

Plus, Desu and Junk, unarguably the two characters with the largest fanbase of one of the more popular moé titles, were in the same group as well. Not to mention as well as Nanoha and Fate, both in the same situation. One might construe as a mere coincidence of fate, two might almost be miraculous(and funny), but three just reeks of human intervention.

I’m never taking anymore of this results as a true marker of popularity anymore. Perhaps we all should make our own (more transparent) version of Saimoe…..

wontaek Said,

>>> Perhaps we all should make our own (more transparent) version of Saimoe…..

That is what I am proposing in AnimeNano Forum. The advantage of English community Popularity Contest is that many Japanese, Chinese, and Koreans, three biggest groups of the anime watcher in language, knows enough English to participate, and we have enough English speaking people who can handle other languages in order to create better help pages for people who are not confident with English. Here is the link to the forum

dkellis Said,

I suppose it’s true that one cannot easily believe something until one actually sees it personally.

I had obviously heard before about all the “tactical voting” and “revenge voting” and such, but it was this matchup where I actually saw all the posts calling for people not to vote for Suiseiseki, but against Yuki. And after the results were posted, I also saw all the calls for people to vote against Suiseiseki, no matter whom she gets matched up with.

This strikes me as being quite against the point of Saimoe. I’ve always believed that it’s a tournament where the criteria for winning was moe. Nothing more, nothing less. Voting against a character (rather than for the opponent) would thus imply that the character is seen to be not moe anymore… which I don’t think applies to any of the final eight.

I believed that people would be able to put aside petty vindictiveness and uphold a sense of fair play and intelligent choices. Apparently I’ve been labouring under a misunderstanding all this time. My faith in human nature and the Saimoe tournament (or indeed, any Internet popularity poll) is rock-bottom right now.

Xellos^_- Said,

Haesslich Said,

dkellis: I suspect that many Suisuiseki fans voted ‘for’ Yuki in a way which invalidated a bunch of votes… which would explain the high number of fakes there (perhaps they had one or two Suisuiseki fans set up a macro to vote 50-100 times, for example)., or else they found another way to ‘invalidate’ a bunch of votes (perhaps because they all came from a certain part of North America, despite having different IPs and different ISPs, they considered it to be ‘one’ person even though the votes were spread out over six hours as would be considered normal, because they all happened in the wee hours on that side of the Pacific).

Skane: Yeah. Right down to the loli abuse. :P

wontaek Said,

My proposal, that I made in AnimeNano Forum, of 12 characters per group, 4 votes per voter, and top 4 advance much reduces the possibilities of revenge vote and gives less room for tactical voting. This format can continue until we are down to less than 20 characters left. It is not as exciting and bloody as one-to-one tournament, but I believe it is the fairest way to discern the top 2 characters for the final.

Spanky Said,

How much more transparent can they make it? They randomized the draw for the main tournament by a process that could (and was) verified by 2chers. They randomized the block winners, again by a process that could be (and was) verified by 2chers. They post a list of valid codes within minutes of the close of every contest; AFAIK there haven’t been any complaints about someone claiming their valid vote was not counted. I don’t think it’s a perfect contest by any means, but transparency is not their problem.